Bluegrass. Classical. Jazz. Country. Swing.
Ask Mark O’Connor what kinds of music he makes, and he’ll give you a list longer than an Econ problem set.
Tonight in Page Auditorium, however, the genre-bending fiddler will have one particular style on the brain as he plays a concert inspired by the legendary Johnny Cash.
He will be joined on stage by Grammy-Award winning singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, daughter of the late Cash, in a Duke Performances double bill that Director of Duke Performances Aaron Greenwald said will make for a vibrant and unique night of music.
“When artists are generating collaborations like this, I think that’s incredibly exciting,” Greenwald said. “So often producers make double bills, and they’re not generated by the artists. But in this case the collaboration was completely organic.”
That collaborative spirit emerged from a deeply painful source. When the elder Cash died in 2003, O’Connor said he knew he needed to pay tribute—both to Cash’s musical legacy and to their long friendship.
So he composed Poets and Prophets, a classical chamber trio in Cash’s memory, layering themes from the Man in Black’s own music over an original composition heavily inspired by O’Connor’s lifelong relationship with the elder statesman of country.
As a nine-year old, O’Connor remembered, Cash’s powerful voice and guitar style had convinced him that he wanted to be a musician. Decades later, O’Connor had done just that, forging a career that eventually brought him back to his boyhood hero, with whom he worked as a session player in the 1980s. But their relationship went deeper than music, and over the years O’Connor formed a friendship with both Cash and his second wife June Carter.
“It was having a connection to Cash in two completely different eras of my life that made Poets and Prophets a wonderful journey for me,” O’Connor wrote in an e-mail.
But that journey didn’t end when the work was finished in 2006. The piece, which National Public Radio said evoked “the piercing directness and populism of Cash’s best work,” quickly caught the ear of Rosanne Cash.
She was moved by the artistic effort he had made for her father, O’Connor explained, and asked him to join her in a series of shows, pairing Poets and Prophets with songs Cash had written in tribute to her father. Cash and O’Connor, joined in his trio by cellist Joey Amini and pianist Melissa Marse, will bring that combination to Duke. Cash will also play from her newest album, The List, a selection of covers taken from a list of essential country tunes her father gave her as a teenager.
In many ways, Greenwald said, the concert will be a meeting of giants. That the two musicians—both incredibly talented and creative in their own right—chose to return to the memory of Johnny Cash is a testament to the deceased star’s far-reaching legacy, he added.
“By all accounts [he] was a really remarkable person,” Greenwald said, “not just as an artist but as a father and as an individual.”
Mark O’Connor and Rosanne Cash perform tonight at 8 p.m. in Page Auditorium. Tickets are $5 for students and $20-38 general admission. Visit dukeperformances.duke.edu for more information.
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